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I was writing a blogpost on Medium and I noticed errors, tried to open LinkedIn? down. tried downdetector? down. Claude.ai is also down

At least for the DNS. Not sure about other services. I am surprised that they don't use Azure!

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There's a site for searching these posts at https://www.wantstobehired.com.

I have been purchasing used/new Lenovo/Dell laptops for the last 7 years, and I have noticed that the build quality of recent models is concerning.

Lenovo: Ex-company gave me a NEW Carbon X1 around 2019, and the battery only lasted for less than a year (!). On the other side, I bought a used 2017 470S from the same company, added more RAM, didn't touch anything including the SSD, and I'm still using it in daily coding. I did buy a new battery last month so technically the old batteries lasted for about 7-8 years.

Dell: I bought 3 laptops + 1 desktop from Dell Refurbished (So the quality should be consistent). 2 laptops + 1 desktop are older models, and 1 is Precision 5550 (2021) that I bought last December. Everything works fine, except for the 5550, which has issues with battery (dropped from 31% to 4% in a few seconds) and (more deadly) charging port (doesn't charge from time to time). Even if I bought it new in 2021, I would be surprised that it only lasted for a bit over 4 years.

The other issue is that 5550 uses USB-C ports. I blame on myself not checking it closely before the purchase. I really hate those ports. Why is everyone copying from Mac?

What's my option? I can't really justify the 2,000+ CAD price point for a new laptop, especially if it lasts less than 5 years. I'd prefer a "low-end" workstation with 32GB memory, but because of the price point I can only afford a 16GB non-workstation one. I don't do gaming any more but I still prefer a good integrated video card. I can't afford Framework and other Linux laptops because they are expensive and usually don't operate in Canada so delivery is expensive too.

I did buy a used Macbook Pro M1 16GB (2021) from my current company last month. I haven't used it but I'm confident that the hardware is good. The problem is I don't really like the software, so I figured I still need a Linux box.

Did you find any sweet spot?

Please state the location and include REMOTE for remote work, REMOTE (US) or similar if the country is restricted, and ONSITE when remote work is not an option.

Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. One post per company. If it isn't a household name, explain what your company does.

Please only post if you are actively filling a position and are committed to responding to applicants.

Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here.

Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.

Searchers: try https://dheerajck.github.io/hnwhoishiring/, http://nchelluri.github.io/hnjobs/, https://hnresumetojobs.com, https://hnhired.fly.dev, https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/, https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com, or this (unofficial) Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-hiring-pro/mpfal....

Don't miss this other fine thread: Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108940

How does one get started with FPGA development in 2025? I have code that runs on my MacBook and I met a trader who suggested I get my code running on FPGA hardware. He didn't know how exactly to get started.

What is a viable path in very late 2025 for a hobbyist to get started?

In Safari on macOS when visiting the Facebook newsfeed, the system mic active icon appears in the menu bar and says that Safari is using it.

I haven't granted permission. When I asked ChatGPT it said 'Safari creates an audio capture session even if the user has not granted microphone permission, for capability negotiation, but no audio data leaves the device until permission is granted.' - is that accurate?

A “hiring” link came across the front page yesterday. After saying they plan to acquire “profitable SaaS companies,” they soon follow with “No support staff answering tickets.” That’s a pretty big red flag; if I’m the paying customer, I’ll be working hard to find a replacement if this company acquires one of my vendors.

This business plan reads like Soulless Private Equity who comes in, eliminates staff expenditures and increases subscription pricing by an order of magnitude to pump the valuation, then sells to some unwitting buyer at a huge profit with a total disregard for the consequences to customers, employees, and whomever else might provide resistance to their monetary motives.

“If you think we're wrong, don't apply.” I’m pretty sure that should go without saying for any job on offer. Phrasing like this just confirms to me there’s no nuance.

Are these the current ethics in Y Combinator?

A sincere question to the many actual & former employees on this forum. And before you get suspicious, yes I understand TVs are underpowered. There are still great streaming apps which perform adequately.

Horrendous quality issues I've seen:

* Deliberately not reusing rendered Activities (e.g. hitting the back button re-draws and re-requests content with painful latency).

* Not cleaning up Ads resources when the ad terminates, so playback drops frames and audio

* Not minding viewed ads, so viewers are punished with duplicate ads plays if they close or skip by accident (Netflix is mindful of this)

* exhausting massive memory -- clear memory leaks and waste

* humiliating UIs for search , playback , scrubbing , etc

* audio/video streams out of sync (e.g. Hulu trailers)

Sure teams are time and budget constrained I get that. But I'm curious about actual stories of corner cutting leading to such painful UIs. It's especially bizarre given that people pay a monthly subscription, so c-sat is rather important.

Known violators are : Kanopy (which bills Public Libraries a hefty subscription), Peacock , HboMax and nearly every other streaming app.

Netflix and Amazon prime are better about performance.

Dashboard not loading. Assets from CDN not loading.

I'm assuming most firms have access to LLM, is it true? If so, is anyone really writing code from scratch lately or relying on the tool to write code for them?

At work, I have access to Github Copilot but it has a lot of guardrail. It is great to debug issues. Minor fixes and enhancement, it is useful. I mostly double check what it wrote and make sure it's code that I can read and understand. If it uses too many shortcut, I tell it to become more 'human readable'.

Now, I've been wanting to learn Python coming from Java and picked up Automate Boring Thing with Python Book. I'm looking at one its exercise which is to walk a tree directory. I can either memorize how its done in Python or just rely on LLM to write it.

Am I wasting time doing these exercises when they can easily be done with LLM within one or two shots? Because doing these exercise from scratch is very time consuming and I have to go back and forth to remember the syntax & libraries.

Can all of LLMs be summarized as a (currently) really expensive search that allows you to express nuanced queries and script the output of the search? Why or why not?

Take code. In a sense, StackOverflow is about finding a code snippet for an already solved problem. Auto complete does the same kind of search in a sense.

Take generative text. In a sense that’s the equivalent of making a query and then aggregating the many results into one phrase. You could imagine the bot searching 1,000 websites and then taking the average of the answers to the query and then outputting the result.

Does every LLM use case fit the following pattern?…

query —-> LLM does its work —-> result —> script of result (optional)

Two years ago, a $24 autopay charge on my Azure account failed. The invoice is now marked "Locked" in their billing portal.

I cannot pay this invoice. There is no button to pay it. There is no button to dismiss it. There is no way to interact with it at all.

Azure displays a banner: "You must pay all previous invoices before creating new subscriptions." Fair enough. I would love to pay it. Microsoft won't let me.

So I tried to contact support.

The Azure portal requires a "paid support plan" to create a support ticket. To purchase a paid support plan, you must create a subscription. To create a subscription, you must clear outstanding invoices. To clear outstanding invoices, you must contact support.

Azure on Twitter, as well as the website claims to have a "free support ticket" option for billing issues, but every possible link just drives you back to the same FAQ page while refusing to let you submit a ticket.

I called every number I could find:

1-800-867-1389 rings busy indefinitely. 1-855-270-0615 connects to an AI that asks what you need, tells you to visit the website, and disconnects. 1-800-642-7676 connects to a different AI that also tells you to visit the website. The website has a chatbot that redirects you to FAQ articles regardless of what you type. If you express frustration, it throws an error and stops responding.

I submitted feedback through the Azure portal every few days for weeks. No response.

I am a software engineer, so I did something ridiculous.

I wrote a PowerShell WinForms application that authenticates via device code flow, queries the Az.Support API for problem classifications, and calls New-AzSupportTicketsNoSubscription to submit a billing support ticket directly, bypassing the portal entirely.

Note the API name: NoSubscription. Microsoft has an explicit API for ticketing without a subscription.

It worked. The ticket was submitted. I felt briefly victorious.

The API responded: "Your support plan type is Free. To create and update support tickets, you need access to our high-tier support plans."

I had built custom software specifically to work around Microsoft's broken support infrastructure, and I still hit a paywall.

The total amount Microsoft is owed: $24.

The total amount Microsoft is preventing me from spending on new Azure services: thousands. I currently run numerous websites out of my house, and it's getting to be enough that I want to offload it to Azure VMs. Additionally, I was going to shift my development to Azure boxes, etc.

I have exhausted every official channel. Every phone number, every chatbot, every feedback form, every API endpoint. There is no path to a human being without first paying for a support plan that I cannot purchase because of the billing block that I need support to resolve.

Has anyone successfully escaped a loop like this? Is there a secret handshake I'm missing? Or is the only option to abandon this Microsoft account entirely, get a new phone, and start fresh?

Hell HN,

I haven't had to buy a Windows computer in 20 years. I am back in school for stenography. As I get older I wanted to learn a "trade" that would ensure I could work into my older years. The school requires Windows as they work with Stenograph hardware.

I've looked everywhere to buy a laptop. I need ram mostly and a few USB ports.

I bought a cheap $200 laptop (16gb ram) at Walmart and after a few months of nothing but troubles I need to acquire something better that is budget friendly but reliable. The problems have been with using the stenography hardware and everything freezing up. The company that makes the stenotype machine is blaming my laptop.

I could spend $500-$1000 (perhaps more if it is compelling). I don't really need all the fluff that comes when you buy a machine these days.

Can anyone recommend a path to finding a reliable, laptop with lots of RAM that will last for several years?

Thank you for clarifying my confusion in the market.

There is a long list of about:config settings that allow users disable most of the recently introduced AI chatbot features in Firefox but unfortunately not all:

AI Context Menu is still displayed if browser.ml.chat.enabled is set to false:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1994785

"Ask an AI Chatbot" context menu is not hidden, even if Machie Learning is disabled:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995119

Mozilla has pretty much ignored this issue for an entire month.

I asked Kagi (free account) and the gist was no. Is there an upper limit in which subscriptions cover all future searches from all future subscribers? What is that number? Or does the scaling up always cost more to deliver?

I'm writing this 38 hours before I go into a surgery on Monday that I may not survive, and while I am told I have a better than 50/50 chance of making it to this time next year, I still feel, though I am too young (early 50s) to deal with these things, that I have wasted too much time. I'd like to impart some lessons.

1. A small number of accomplishments really mean something, but you often won't know which ones. I started three companies and two were successes, and even though they comprised more than two decades of my life, I feel like I remember a grand total of six important hours between them. Meanwhile, I still remember the shed I built for my father in the first summer after college. Whatever seems unimportant, you will care about the most.

2. The thing you do today, you will probably do tomorrow. I've wasted a lot of time, but most people I know have wasted lots of time, and it's because of the tendency to make an exception of the present day, which either excuses laziness or pathological busyness, which is a form of the same thing. "I'll do it tomorrow." But tomorrow it will be today. It's always today.

3. Ethics matter. I don't believe there's any life after this one, but I find myself ruminating on what I've done. In 2015, I had a lot of interaction with a startup incubator you know well, and ended up sitting in the discussions and planning around banning and erasing a young programmer we considered a threat to our financial interests, due to his concerns about authoritarianism in technology. In retrospect, he was harmless, but an example had to be made. The decision was made to ban him here, try to get him fired though I don't know if we succeeded, and attack him with sockpuppets on Reddit, and it seems to have worked because you don't hear his name much.

Ten years later, I'm still stuck thinking about this. Am I the kind of person who does shitty things? I was. Am I still? How would I even know?

I don't believe that faith is an out, or that you can apologize or donate your way out of past behaviors. You will always be the person who has done what you have done.

4. Be kind to animals. There are few joys like having a dog. I always refused when my ex-wife wanted one, and she got one after we separated. For her, it was probably an upgrade.

5. I developed a knack for founding companies, but I never learned how to build communities. They aren't the same thing. You might have three hundred people at your company and you truly feel like they are your village, but they're not. Circumstances will change, and people will move, and in five years, most of them will not remember your name.

That's probably enough for now. My mind goes between periods of racing and long spells of languid acceptance. All humans end up in the place where I am, and I hope you reach it with fewer regrets than I have.

Two and a half years ago I submitted "Warn HN: I've never seen the HN community so delusional about a major tech area" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35172767

Since then, many corporations, governments, Wall St, and central banks have begun adopting public blockchains, especially Ethereum, and stablecoins.

Hacker News has been almost 100% anti-crypto/public blockchains/stablecoins for years.

In light of recent progress, has your view changed?

What is better to use lead-free/leaded solder, Considering safety and effectiveness, different sites give different answers, some say lead-free is better, others they are equally harmful. I want to hear your opinion.

Hello, please forgive any grammatical errors on my part for I am not an English native speaker. I found this thread regarding the death of ttn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457796

I am Thien-Thi's daughter, my dad was a very private person, so I found out about the thread only recently.

Since I can't leave a comment, I'm making a new thread to thank everyone for the kind words regarding his passing.

I have been experimenting more deeply with agentic coding, and it’s made me rethink how I approach building software.

One key difference I have noticed is the upfront cost. With agentic coding, I felt a higher upfront cost: I have to think architecture, constraints, and success criteria before the model even starts generating code. I have to externalize the mental model I normally keep in my head so the AI can operate with it.

In “precision coding,” that upfront cost is minimal but only because I carry most of the complexity mentally. All the design decisions, edge cases, and contextual assumptions live in my head as I write. Tests become more of a final validation step.

What I have realized is that agentic coding shifts my cognitive load from on-demand execution to more pre-planned execution (I am behaving more like a researcher than a hacker). My role is less about 'precisely' implementing every piece of logic and more about defining the problem space clearly enough that the agent can assemble the solution reliably.

Another observation has been that since the cost of writing code is minimal as agents are delegated to write them, there is a need for me to shift and context and also take up the QA role to evaluate the agents output.

Would love to hear your thoughts?

Most good posts die in /newest, buried under low-quality submissions.

HN depends on people visiting /newest and upvoting or flagging what they see.

A few minutes there each day probably does more for HN than commenting.

It’s anonymous, thankless work, like Reddit’s old “Knights of New,” but it makes a difference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The lowest end BX11 has 1TB storage, free bandwidth, for €3.80 a month with VAT or $4.40. Object storage is a tad more and egress is billed, but you may setup Garage for your own S3 on any cloud.

I am not technical I just like building and making friends and having fun inventing

It feels 70% of people I meet, are trying to determine what you can get them, if u r important enough or trying to butter you up in a coffee chat

What happened to building cool stuff, not having a ego and being real. Sorry if this isnt allowed. I dont know where else to post. Am i hanging out in the wrong crowds?

I'm having a hard time.

I lack the skills to sell myself.

I have a hard time communicating, even this post. It feels like I'm looking through 100x zoom, I can't find a clarity of message. I used to sit to write résumés for hours and hours, to come up with nothing of value.

Lack of schooling and lack of real-world experience contributed. I didn't get interviews, and when I did, they weren't impressed. Mia culpa.

---

While others worked publicly and sent out hundreds of résumés, I worked privately and sent nothing for years. Years!

Now I'm trying to be practical and freelance, which I've tried twice before. There are a lot of jobs that I have the skills for easily, but when I try to write my profile, or my past projects, I spin out endlessly.

---

Concretely, although I don't have any major projects shipped, I do have a lot of previous software with relevant problems I solved. I can show the problem, the code, and the results. For example, extraction from a PDF -> Script -> SQLite database. I don't have to say:

"This was part of an unfinished project I did, blah blah blah."

I can just show it and say I worked on it. Whether contracted or my own code, it does what it does, and as I'm contracted for jobs, I can show those results too (if the client is ok with it.

But I just. Can't. Get. Moving.

It's been so many years. It's like an asymptote, I can't break through it. I just need to break through it once, get some momentum. For this concrete (freelancing) problem, any advice?

Can LLMs like Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude be used to generate an equivalent FOSS project but removed from its licence and authorship?

Would this be legal?

For example, if a SaaS corporation wanted to modify and sell a service using some AGPL project can they use AI to entirely rewrite that project effectively detaching it from its original creator and ownership?

I was looking for some good discounts on software for BF and realized that I really should do the effort of sending a bit of money to the "hero-devs" who's free and oss software has made my (and others) life a bit better.

Started making a list of extensions, programs, etc etc and was like… I really need to make more money…

Then I thought of all the behind the scenes libraries etc that a lot of these projects depend on... I unfortunately don't have time to go through all the EULA's etc but I wanna support / show my appreciation for these guys as well.

There are offcourse the obvious ones like linux, ffmpeg,FSF etc. but more looking for the small guys who are just as essential (insert obligatory https://xkcd.com/2347/) but don’t hog the limelight.

If you are one of them, or know one of these please share here.

Note: Currently looking for a job so think appreciation coffee rather than life changing amount - I do wanna make this an annual thing and hope to give more next year / next job If you could use a free guide / walk through / description, basic UX analysis willing to do those for free / approx one hour per project each. Will donate to 20 programs I personally use and 20 “invisible heroes”.

Thx for your time / suggestions, happy december

I built this because I watched my LangChain agent burn ~$50 in OpenAI credits overnight due to an infinite loop.

It's a middleware API that acts as a 'Flight Simulator'. You send it your agent's prompt, and it runs adversarial attacks (Red Teaming) to catch loops and PII leaks before deployment.

Code & Repo: https://github.com/Saurabh0377/agentic-qa-api Live Demo: https://agentic-qa-engine.onrender.com/docs

Would love feedback on other failure modes you've seen!

Looking for any kind of advice (links to good job boards, company names, people to contact, blogs to read, general tips) about migrating to the games industry.

I'm a senior software engineer, working on random web stuff forever, and I want to work in the games industry. I'm not in a rush, so anything I can do between now and the next two years I'll consider. I have some constraints though: I would like to stay remote, and have a "safe" job (I say that because I've heard many stories where people are hired to make a single game and are fired right after launch, which would be too risky for me).

Gaming has been my passion forever, and I even make some minigames in my free time. Right now I'm just trying to mix things up, to put my engineering skills into something I might like more. I understand that's a bit naive, but I have no reason not to try.